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John Altoon (November 5, 1925 – February 8, 1969) was an American artist. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Armenians parents, from 1947 to 1949 he attended the Otis Art Institute, from 1947 to 1950 he also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in 1950 the Chouinard Art Institute. Altoon was a prominent figure in the LA art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Baxter Museum, Pasadena, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (opened June 2014).
Altoon, during his Ferus Gallery years, did the Ocean Park series which depicted an area around Venice and Santa Monica beach towns in California. The series was 18 paintings as well some works he did on paper. It had the direct from brain to hand & brush approach he was known for:The Cool School the abstracting of nature on his canvas by pushing through a spontaneous approach, freehand biomorphic in design giving us his interpretation as a direct rendering of the coastal surroundings.
Altoon was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late 30s and had bouts of depression and paranoia. In the early 1960s he became a patient of Dr. Milton Wexler a prominent psychoanalyst who restored his ability to work and from then until his death became the most productive and stable years in his life. He was "possessed by real demons," Larry Bell remembers.
Irving Blum, partner in the Ferus Gallery, recalls: "If the gallery was closest in spirit to a single person, that person was John Altoon—dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious—and slightly mad." Altoon's struggle with mental illness, his big, dark, robust personality and his early death from a heart attack at 44 have, even more than his art itself, come to define his legacy."
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